Gossip Girl Reboot Update: Expect 'Non-White Leads,' a 'Lot of Queer Content'

Thank god — finally some woke content.

Josh Safran is still kicking around Hollywood? I'll add this to the must miss list.

I have no interest in watching this newer version. Enough of the pandering.

Hopefully the fashion will be on point.

shitastic!

Will there be waffles?

[quote]Expect a 'Lot of Queer Content'

Can't wait.

Bye, r 8.

R8. Racist Pete supporter.

They should have Penn Badgely make a guest appearance from You to go on a killing spree

The Dan character in the books played by Penn Badgely on the tv show once had a boyfriend. Too bad the tv show didn't go there with him.

Non-white is code for black.

The twist will probably be "who killed Serena" or something like that.

Chuck and Nate better bone this time.

[quote]Chuck and Nate better bone Dan this time.

Fixed.

[Quote] “It is 12 years, I guess 13 years after the original,” says Safran. “So we are in realtime from the original where we are in the show.”

Can't believe it's been that long 😦

Queer content... So lesbians & bisexuals girls ?

Leads

There would have been plenty of queer content if they'd just let Chace and Sebastian fuck like they wanted.

Eli Brown played gay on Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists. Hopefully he'll be gay in this too.

I love the virtue signaling of all of it!

Hey Washington Heighters, Gossip Gurl here with a nonbinary update.

By queer content they mean an unlimited supply of naked femme lesbians (straight people HATE them!), a "lesbian" cis-female married to a "pansexual" cis-male (how non-traditional!), and an interracial gay male couple who look like Rupaul and Carson Kressely and are asexual. But they'll be sassy, have one-line zingers, and only kiss on the cheek! We've come so car!

*We've come so far

There will be Aydn, a non-binary, and Princessa Lilly Fair, a trans woman.

Don't forget a cripple.

I have no idea who any of those people are.

"Queer" means lesbians and trannies, no gay male characters.

R17 Yup.

'Lot of Queer Content' = Non-gay content

Non-White Leads = Non-Hispanic and Non-Asian Minorities.

Judging by that Just Jared post two whites, two blacks and one latino. Nothing wrong with that, especially since the guys are hot.

And, of course, no Asians. Great diversity!

TBF, these days Asians are represented in almost all productions to please the Chinese.

Where, R33?

Nobody wants to watch this. Nobody will.

Why does everything have to be a reboot now? Why not just make a brand new show with original characters, concepts, etc.? Or is that too much to ask?

What show will get a "woke" reboot next? The Golden Girls where they are all trans POC?

It's too financially risky starting a new show. Th old ones already have name recognition. Why do you think there are so many Broadway musicals which are based on movies, biographies of famous singers, or previous Broadway musicals?

Scottish Thomas Doherty has been added to the cast.

.....

The show's success will depend on likable villains like Blair Waldorf, Georgina Sparks, or Chuck Bass with his Marlon Brando whispering line delivery.

And we all know what they mean by "lots of queer content". Multiple lesbians, a trans FTM, and one single effeminate gay man who either dies, is written off, or is barely present.

R40 I guess. I basically hated everyone by season 2 and stuck around for the fashion lol

At least we know that 2 gay actors will be in the cast in some form - Adam Chanler-Berat and Jason Gotay

Wasn't an essential part of the show that the leads were hot?

I will check it out, but my issue is the world of Gossip Girl is a very "white" world. Diversity is fine, but the Upper East Side, private school, monied set is still very white with a smattering of Asian and some Middle Eastern faces. Black and brown people are few and far between and in many cases are not American.

Let me guess... The girls are black, but not "too black".

R44 that's an essential for every CW show. But none of the main guys ever did anything for me. Chuck is ugly as hell.

[quote][R44] that's an essential for every CW show. But none of the main guys ever did anything for me. Chuck is ugly as hell.

While Ed Westwick is not my ideal, I do recognize that he'd be considered objectively attractive.

These new leads would not be "conventionally" attractive by most standards.

A big topic among elite NYC girls schools is how they accommodate trans students. Expect there to be at least one trans student in the “woke” mix.

Cracks fingers, couple of thoughts.

1. Who is their target demographic for this show? Young teens, 20 something people, nostalgic Millennials?

2. I'm happy they are giving the show a second chance, because they kept the cast so small that it was getting ridiculous how often 5 friends would just go around fucking each other when they have millions of dick and pussy in NYC.

3. The original show made NYC feel very small.

4. Where was the drama. By S4 the old GG was like stale bread. All they did was get dressed for a cocktail party, mention school, have unnecessary 2 min conversations (taking a cab/subway across the city) that could have been conducted over the phone, then wrap it up with a crapy one liner. It was like a low budget Dynasty. The remake better bring the drama and outlandish story lines.

2. I think if they want to get serious, they should make this into an east coast rich kids version of Euphoria. So much potential from that show. These kids lives were supposed to be scandalous, yet none of the leads did drugs, party, get drunk, or even have sex unless it for the season opener to get the ratings up. I was so confused about the "shocking" nature of the show.

3. I wish them the best of luck this multicultural cast. The area isn't diverse, but it's a TV show. I'm willing to give this a shot, but if it's TV-14 I'll pass. Too old for kids shows.

Here is Euphoria killing i with just an ad.

Elite doing a gay casting couch scene.

Elite threesome.

So torn - love Jason Gotay, but Josh Safran is just such an awful person and I really don't want to support anything that involves him.

BORING

[Quote] These kids lives were supposed to be scandalous, yet none of the leads did drugs, party, get drunk, or even have sex unless it for the season opener to get the ratings up. I was so confused about the "shocking" nature of the show.

I was too. I remember all of the "outrage" over GGs [italic] sex scenes [/italic]. And it was nothing. But it was good pr for the show.

.....

[quote] These kids lives were supposed to be scandalous, yet none of the leads did drugs, party, get drunk, or even have sex unless it for the season opener to get the ratings up. I was so confused about the "shocking" nature of the show.

They did a threesome storyline with guest star Hilary Duff where she made out with Jessica Szor while Penn Badgley watched. I think that was one of the edgiest, controversial, things they did.

I’m really not interested in non-white characters, I hated how they made the Colbys black in the “Dynasty” remake. Stop trying to push this diversity shit. Keep the black people to the Cosbys, the Fresh Prince, Family Matters, BET, and let white people keep their shows.

Yeah everyone should be straight and white! /s R58

R57 i guess it was edgy for Hilary lol

R58 are you lost??

Trannies love to erase gay men. They resent our suffering.

[quote] One particular scene in which Dan (Penn Badgley), Olivia (Hilary Duff), and Vanessa (Jessica Szohr) decide to attempt the worst college threesome imaginable prompted mass complaints, with the Parents Television Council suggesting the show was urging that “teenagers should engage in behaviors heretofore associated primarily with adult films.”

Queer content = trans, non-binary and rainbow haired attention seekers.

Exactly, R63.

Trannies are the worst thing on earth!!! Yeah they’ve been thru so much. Did they forget the AIDS crisis that killed half of us? Trannies haven’t been thru anything. Just catered to. Drop the T! LGB power!

[Quote] Dan (Penn Badgley), Olivia (Hilary Duff), and Vanessa (Jessica Szohr) decide to attempt the worst college threesome imaginable

Lmfao

[quote] Queer content = trans, non-binary and rainbow haired attention seekers.

They sure got your attention, don't they?

Penn B has a new show. I doubt he will be in this one. He was my reason to watch the original.

R68 even if he wasn't doing You, I don't think he'd come back. Doesn't seem like he enjoyed working on the show.

So many bigoted Trump supporters here, or Russian trolls, or are they the same person? Anyway it's obvious there is at least one gay man on this show at this point so stfu with the fake arguments.

My nieces go to a private Catholic school in NYC. Never watched this garbage so don't know what type of school the show portrayed. Unlike what was said here there are lots of Latinos even more than Asians and Middle Easterns (Christian Arabs) though the Latinos are majorly Caucasian. Didn't Perez Hilton attend a school like this? That's the kind of Latinos you see there a lot. The white ones. It would be refreshing to have white Latinos in a show like that.

Let me guess -- our right-wing racist/bigot contingent hates it.

How many gender non-binary, gendrrqueer, asexual, trans people will this show have? My guess is they'll have zero gay male characters though, unless they're maybe trans or "queer".

r71 for the win for the most useless contribution to this thread about a fictional show.

[quote] Never watched this garbage so don't know what type of school the show portrayed.

r73

You're as fake as they come. How do you see the cast and think there will be no gay male character? Oh, you had this planned from the start and don't give a fuck about anything other than spreading your divisive bullshit.

Ignore the trolls and the haters. They just try to get under people's skin.

R32 but on the original GG there was a Chinese actress (Nan Zhang) playing an Israeli character Katy Farkas.

That other black girl is now a nutritionist.

R77 didn't they both disappear from the show?? Or maybe it was just one of them?

......

I believe Blair's sidekicks left when the leading characters graduated.

R77 Yes she is. She got her Masters and became a Certified Nutritionist

Show me a threesome where the two men kiss each other, thats novel. Another show of a women having to guys and Elite even made sure how disgusting would it be for the 2 to kiss. That aint progress.

Elite on Netflix had a threesome in season 3 where 2 of the guys kissed each other R82

R81 she looks great.

People complaining that original GG wasn’t “edgy enough” miss the point. It was about glamour - jetsetting, champagne, polo. A life where people don’t have to clock in to real jobs or worry about making rent, yes, but more than that a life where there are intricate rules of etiquette & presentation and everyone must have impeccable sparkling wit to exist. Real WASPs aren’t that snarky or glitzy or fun to be with. It’s the fantasy of life that never existed.

When Blair fantasises about being in a real-life ‘Roman Holiday’? That’s the show, too. It’s basically MGM-style AU fanfic; the dramedic Hollywood imagining of upper-class living.

The teen angst sexcapade bullshit was just a way to promote cheap & dirty, like the above posters point out. It was never about gritty reality of youths. Blair & Chuck’s relationship at the centre of it all proves that - they were 17, 18, 21 & 25 year old unattached lovers behaving like middle-aged divorcees trying to rekindle the flame.

[quote] It was about glamour - jetsetting, champagne, polo.

Perfect background for the new edition's characters

GG was the modern version of the original Dynasty of how the rich socialites live, party, and make the occasional attempt to have a career.

I will play Tartine Gramercy, an heiress to a vermouth fortune and a freshman at NYU.

Full power to the virtue signaler!

Watching the first few seasons of the original show, it boggles the mind how thirteen years on from the pilot airing, it’s Seblahstian, ‘Boring Dan’ Badgely & Blake Unlively who have made it further than WHETs Meester & Westwick.

True that Blair & Chuck were silly 1950’s cartoon characters, but they sparkled and popped off that screen together or apart right through all six seasons. Win or lose they made some iconic television.

Meester & Westwick had their more or less sordis sex scandals. Meester that leaked clip of giving a guy a footjob and Westwick had the metoo accusation that cost him at least one role afterwards. I am glad for Meester having at least some success with the family comedy Single Parents.

I’m closely connected to an NYC girls school. What the show gets wrong is that the girls in these schools are virtually all obsessed with grades and success. The kids in all of these top tier NYC privates compete through their accomplishments. It’s the parents who really play the games with the clothes and the wealth and the drama.

r92, what the show did right was how cliquish (high school times ten) they are. Dan had a really difficult time to get accepted by Serena's friends ... and given the end of the series they were right to be cautious about outsiders like him.

That is true, R93. And their clique starts in preschool, if not before.

This is how Hollywood is slowing destroying itself. Despite the population still being largely white, there's an effort to erase white people from TV and movies thanks to a select group of Jewish white males who are actually in charge of things (they are, don't have your head up your ass and call this anti-semitism). It's as racist as anything from before the civil rights era.

[Quote] it’s Seblahstian, ‘Boring Dan’ Badgely & Blake Unlively who have made it further than WHETs Meester & Westwick.

Blake had industry connections because of her family. "Dating" Leo Dicaprio certainly put her name out there and then the nude scandal with Batfleck. But now she's married to Ryan who clearly prefers her to be a stay at home mum. Badgley didn't get much attention until You.

While Leighton might not have the better career, she still works consistently and seems content with Adam. The Roommate was a terrible movie but i love it.

[quote] Dan had a really difficult time to get accepted by Serena's friends ... and given the end of the series they were right to be cautious about outsiders like him.

R93 one of my favorite moments of the last season touches brilliantly on this. I don’t remember exactly when; maybe a few episodes before the where Chuck & Blair cobble together their shotgun wedding and before they get hauled off by the cops for Bart’s death.

In any event, the scene has Serena talking to Blair on the steps of some civic building, and they’re talking about Blair accepting her non-fairytale but still-happy ending with Chuck in comparison to Serena’s hoped-for future with Dan. It would seem Serena is expecting the blushing Blair to get over her prejudice and tell her best friend to go for her own happiness, at long last; instead Blair just sneers at her romantic notions the same way she always has since they both first met Dan at Constance, and she goes on to set Serena straight that no matter how close Dan gets to their group and all their secrets - even if he marries Serena and takes her name - he’ll never truly be one of them because he’s not to the manner born, and that’s just that.

While in the finale & epilogue GG did wuss out with an “everybody’s friends what systemic inequality??” closer (with Dan sitting in the reception room of The Bass’s house), Blair kept her pragmatic snobbish qualities to the bitter end and that felt in-keeping with the original premise and her characterisation. It would have been nonsensical seeing stubborn myopic proud elitist Blair Waldorf suddenly changing her entire raison d’être and getting over her many years of conditioned distrust, just because her bff 5ever couldn’t let go of a civilian boy they’d both strung along and pitied like a mongrel pup for seven years. It was a rough cold ashy bitchslap back to reality, after a whole season of La Durèe fluff and high-polish melodrama.

Little touches like this is why a reboot won’t fly. How can you put on a show with heroic sympathetic billionaires living a fantasy today, with general audiences getting poorer, and more desperate, and more painfully aware of how sociopathic the one percent in our world really are? It was a fluke they kept getting away with it through the 2010s in the first place.

True, R91. Public memory is very long especially when it comes to scenes of a sexual nature. As R96 proves, bearding is the way to go for best PR and later roles, rather than broadcasting actual sexploits.

Didn’t Westwick rape a woman? And isn’t he a bisexual closet-case? If so on either or both counts then he’s getting more than he deserves career-wise, which at the time of writing is parts in unseen shorts, budget war films and BBC 2 sitcoms nobody liked.

Sidebar, it’s really odd hearing Ed speak normally (I.e., not whispering) using British English - and I am a Brit myself. He would be a prime example for that recent thread about actors tarnished by one big role...

what do they mean by ‘queer’ exactly? Homosexuals? Lesbians?

R99 whatever is most convenient.

Trans women of color R99

ah, TWOC. Perhaps they’ll be sex workers too. And of size, and Latinx.

The original Gossip Girl worked, because people still had some kind of respect and admiration for rich people and their fancy lifestyle (hoping to be one of them one day), but I think society has become more cynical of the 1% . Even if the leading cast is all complaining about their 1% rich parents and rejecting all sorts of conservative restrictions they'll still come off as tone-deaf for spending their parents' money and living a life of privilege.

And I think in regard to the show I think queer means Bohemian hipster where the cast tries their best to look and act as different from their parents as possible.

However I will very likely watch the shit out of it, because I'm a sucker for such CW type of entertainment.

anyone: *asks Serena to explain herself* Serena: I hAvE tO gO :/ :/

R104 😆😆😆

[quote] Another show of a women having to guys and Elite even made sure how disgusting would it be for the 2 to kiss.

I didn't get that from the show. Just that Polo was very conflicted about being bi.

I would love a US, or any country, show to be ok with male leading cast members dating each other every once in a while. All we've gotten so far on adult and teen drama shows (apart from Queer As Folk, of course) is where leading cast members are paired up with one guy and one girl up or some love triangle where two of the same gender fight over one of the opposite. Would the world really end if two guys from the leading cast have this long arc where they fall for each other, hook up, keep the relationship a secret, the relationship comes out in a big way, and then they break up in a big drama way, date girls and still remain in the same circle of friends?

[Quote] Would the world really end if two guys from the leading cast have this long arc where they fall for each other, hook up, keep the relationship a secret, the relationship comes out in a big way, and then they break up in a big drama way, date girls and still remain in the same circle of friends?

No, the world wouldn't end. But it must be a different story for those who work in Hollyweird.

These diversified reboots are ridiculous.

If there is a demand for it why not make a new diverse tv show, something new!

Why co-opt something that already exists and served its purpose?

how about they just do it all over, following the plot of the books this time around?

here, I even made a primer (this was the legit canon content of the source material that became the CW show; I am not making any of this up.):

....our main character the midget brunette naif Little Jenny Humphrey (she’s 4”11 with bouncy curls and marshmallow tits…very Taylor Momsen) hates attention from guys even though she goes to a girls’ school where she may easily avoid it, but nonetheless takes dodgy supplements to get 36DDs (though Jenny's main hangup was that she could never find the right bra, fit into button-ups or wear lux fashion/sample size with her natural 34Ds?) like her idol Serena (yep, not Blair) because her neglectful absentee mother is off somewhere in Europe doing something fun with her life and Little J has no other positive female guidance in her life to make up for this (and that might be why she copes with multiple instances of sexual assault with codependent amnesiac behaviour). Though she’s just 13 or 14 years old when we meet her she often goes on wild and embarrassing escapades to set an image for herself, once accidentally (??) starring in a near-pornographic photo shoot for an article entitled "Does Breast Size Matter?" She even make an underage sextape of her and Nate Archibald to circulate on the Internet (this is was in the days before ‘send nudes’ and Chaturbate and phone-hacks). She has a lesbian bestie named Elise who keeps trying to fondle her breasts. Jenny ends up going to a boarding school, Waverly Academy, to reinvent herself as the "It Girl", a la Serena;

so she begrudgingly lives in an expensive UES loft with her older brother, the slutty-bi-curious/doggerel-writing/chainsmoking/emaciated nearly-a-goth Dan whose ‘art’ consists of yell-singing his morbid existentialist emoetry in a terrible indie band or writing poems for the New Yorker with titles like ‘Sluts’, and whose one true love is hardcore punk/queercore gurl & auteur & au-pair Vanessa Abrams (in the books, a white hippie New England transplant with a shaved head who everyone but Dan is convinced is a butch lesbian), though you’d think otherwise with the way Dan makes a life’s work of stalking Serena and only acknowledges Vanessa’s importance to him after many years and after Chuck in all his rapine and sex-pestery (at least something made it to the show) steals his hipster boyfriend/Salon partner-in-crime/bookstore colleague Greg (as vague revenge for something Serena did years prior and also because he’s Chuck Bass, and that means something totally different in this canon, btw). Dan’s sexual confusion is all that gets Dan’s mother to come back to her family (she tries to throw Dan a coming-out party without even asking if he’s gay, it’s bonkers). Dan has a literal medical addiction to caffeine and something close to a death-wish...

(more to follow)

….so Dan's muse/stalking target, the middle-child syndrome sufferer Serena van der Woodsen (nb. in the books Eric is her distant heterosexual older brother away at Brown, and she has a short tense quasi-sexual/romantic incestuous relationship with him similar to the one he has with Blair….yeah) is expelled from her boarding school for partying too hard and missing all her classes, but this doesn’t matter because she becomes an It Girl/movie Siren/rockstar’s girlfriend/designer’s muse to the point she has a mysterious body part (implied to be either her belly-button or her nipple or her anus or her clit) photographed as a piece of modern art that appeared on ads all over NYC and also a perfume named after her for which the promotional photo they used was of her crying a single tear after Aaron Rose broke up with her because she humiliated him with a slogan tee worn on a Fashion Week runway. we are told in the books by all the characters and by Gossip Girl herself that Serena is literally perfection, and this is grounds enough to hate her and wish for her destruction. sidenote: Serena’s mother Lily & Dan’s father Rufus never meet once let alone fall in love and marry or have a lovechild, and in fact Lily is a happily-married NPC rarely seen or heard from at all while Rufus is not a cool doting ex-rockstar but a failed bitter balding sadsack incel publisher & KGB sympathiser (he runs an anarchist group by the end, seriously) who has no idea his kids that he so resents are running wild;

the only person consistently on Serena's side is her favorite fuck, the devastatingly-Abercrombieish woobie dropout pothead & former jock heartthrob Nate Archibald who is lost in life after being castigated for stealing his Lacrosse’s coach’s Viagra supply and the fact that he has a poorly-treated substance abuse problem (rehab in the Hamptons is very ineffectual) masking walking depression because his mother is a French socialite who never wanted kids and because he can’t pick who to settle for between Blair & Serena & Jenny (who I’m pretty sure he fucks when she’s still only around 17). along with his schizo stand-in girlfriend & drug-buddy Georgie (yep, that one – he meets her in rehab) he is constantly getting high hence his poor decision-making and weird choices (cf. the Saga of Chips) though at some point he does manage to sack up and take his girlfriend Blair’s v-card like she wants even if he only did this so Blair & her father would pull strings to get him into Yale. He has a cute little homoerotic soccer-playing group of jock-friends in the novels that never make it into the show. incidentally Chuck & Nate are not friends until the final books when they both wind up doing so badly in school that neither get into College after graduation (even with bribes & Blair’s help), and as a result Chuck’s parents (both still alive and together) send him away to some bizarre underground Puritanical military/farm school where he has to milk cows and read Proust and wear burlap (though he is still handed a do-nothing six-fig zero-accountability banking career by his Dad on the proviso he gets a degree later). Nate later chooses to attend this same school for a year with Chuck because he thinks they both need the discipline as young men…it’s kind of gay tbh...

(part 3 below)

unlike the show, Chuck Bass of the books doesn’t fuck Blair first, or much at all and in fact has no serious interest in Blair until the very end, and even then isn’t crazy obsessed by her. in this canon Chair don’t end up blissfully stable and married with an adorable son or an exquisite townhouse either, because Chuck is a villainous eccentric date-raping mostly-homosexual friend-to-no-one and decidedly minor character. He is described by other characters as unbearably annoying and loathsome but nevertheless a handsome (what happened there, CW?) dapper drunkard who throws the best parties in the UES. Nobody is certain about his sexual orientation, and it’s implied he enjoys boys’ school and military academy more than most because of his weakness for cock. Chuck’s closest relationship with a female is with his obnoxious pet monkey named Sweetie (her story arc is sad), who can often be found perching on his shoulder to hiss at people and wearing coordinated outfits to Chuck’s. As a teen Chuck is so perverted and gross and abusive that he is largely despised by other characters, but because their families have been friends for generations and because of his wealth they tolerate his egotistical antics and accept him for what he is: a spoiled lecherous party animal. He is described as having eye-bleeding taste in fashion and as ‘metrosexual’ (every time he appears, pretty much). He drives a Mercedes everywhere (rather than being driven by limo as in the tv show) and drinks a lot of Irish whisky. He has about twenty apartments all over NYC but does not own a hotel as in the show. All that remains of his novel characterisation in the series is his early episodes (say, 1.1-1.5), where he almost took advantage of a vulnerable Jenny Humphrey and tried to rape an inebriated Serena van der Woodsen (who is not his stepsister or any relation at all to him in the books) while encouraging Nate to take Blair’s virginity (from episode 2--Blair: “you’re disgusting” Chuck: “yes, I am”). For some reason after the military school debacle and becoming Nate’s platonic soulmate, Chuck turns 180 and tries to get Blair to be his lavender Stepford Wife, but she’s not ready to settle down or let go of her lesbian obsession with S. so he gets left high-and-dry and alone;

....unlike her star-crossed lover Nate, violently-bulimic/OCD-case/binge-drinking/Merits cigarettes & Louboutin thigh-highs aficionado/sociopath & bullying bitch Blair Waldorf ( described as 5'4" slender with blue eyes and a fox-like face) attends and graduates from Yale at all costs (despite seducing her married middle-aged interviewer in order to get in…) while inveigling her way into commandeering a penthouse at the Plaza AND managing a messed-up sex-type thing with Serena’s brother, plus to compound the proxy fuckery she has a Harvard-going militant-vegan Saab-driving creepy stepbrother of her own named Aaron Rose (we never see or hear of him in the show, he probably doesn’t exist) who to Blair’s delight manages to fuck and fuck WITH Serena big-time even from another state? Her parents Eleanor & Cyrus have an oops-baby, and they let Blair name her new little half-sister…she picks Yale. Blair uses her charm, money and social clout to get what she wants. Her biological father, once an uptight lawyer, chose to divorce Blair’s mother for a more bohemian life in a French chateau with his boyfriend, Giles, and their adopted Cambodian twins, Ping and Pong (…..I have nothing I can say about this). Blair’s main bond with her father is materialistic, and they both share of love of fine shoes. Her plot in one of the novels is that she gets a pixie-cut and then extensions because she’s having a breakdown over not being able to hold on to a man at age 19. Her fixation on Serena crosses into sapphic at various points, and the two BFFs are written to have a very charged relationship that involves pantyless sleepover romps and making out in clubs as well as plenty of jealous stalking and admiring each other naked...

btw the tepid Nate-Blair-Serena love triangle that only spanned the first seasons in the show actually lasts for the entire book series (so, years) and right up until the end the result is up in the air, but in his last few pages the girls decide to punk us all by rejecting Nate to travel Europe together instead, so he sails off in a boat on the advice of a dead sailor-man who once mentored him & his dad (Chips!);

To top it all off there is frequent mention and instances of freaky spicy sexplay like golden showers and public handjobs and hot-tub orgies between schoolkids, and we never find out who the Gossip Girl reporting on all this is (it does not matter at all to the characters in the novels) or whether she’s even a real character herself rather than an omniscient narrator.

That's it, that's 13 books worth of superficial soap-opera trash that the CW did nothing with. But maybe this time...

OH and I forgot to mention also that Serena's biggest claim to fame in the books is that she becomes a movie-star, famous for being the leading lady in a remake (!!!!) of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S. In the last books random strangers and civilians and poors keep coming up to her in the street for autographs and this drives Blair insane enough that she cuts Serena out of her life to go and live in Newport/Oxford, England with Chuck.

[Quote] These diversified reboots are ridiculous.

The latest casualty being Party Of Five.

Billionaire trust fund trans kids, getting reassigned back and forth just because they can.

R4 the ‘couture’ on original GOSSIP GIRL looked like trash much of the time, plus by the final seasons the fashions on display wallpapered shoddy embarrassing acting and broke the frame of reality (even the wealthiest teens don’t dress like that) .

Blake in particular was given gowns that did not flatter her in the least. Did the CW have a deal with Kneepads?